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A CHIUSTMAS 
MEDITATION 



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LAWRENCE GILMAN 



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A Christmas Meditation 



A Christmas Meditation 

By 

Lawrence Gilman 



New York 

E» P* Dutton & Company 

6ZI Fifth Avenue 



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Copyright, 1916 

BY 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 






GCT 28 1915 



"Cbe Iknfcfeerbocfeer Qtees, Hew JtJorft 



*>CI.A446145 



AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 
TO MY BROTHER 

JOSEPH GILMAN 

IN RECOGNITION OF HIS INTEREST IN THESE 

FUGITIVE REFLECTIONS ON AN 

IMMEMORIAL THEME 



NOTE 

The following reflections con- 
tain, in a revised and somewhat 
extended form, the substance of 
an editorial which the author 
wrote for the Christmas, 19 10, 
issue of Harper's Weekly. He is 
indebted to the courtesy of the 
proprietors of the Weekly at that 
time, Messrs. Harper and Bro- 
thers, for permission to make 
this use of his contribution. 



' ' They shall hunger no more, neither 
thirst any more. . . . For the Lamb, 
which is in the midst of the throne, 
shall feed them, and shall lead them 
unto living fountains of waters: and 
God shall wipe away all tears from 
their eyes." — Rev., vii. : 16, 17. 



A Christmas Meditation 



AS the years take their 
ever-quickening passage 
across our hearts we are 
likely to find Christmas a 
more and more difficult ordeal 
for the spirit. No man or 
woman who has known the 
common lot of mutation and 
sorrow can face the day with- 
out misgivings, without a quail- 
ing of the soul for which there 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

need be no shame. The 
thronging memories of dead 
years are never so poignantly 
insistent as on that festival of 
festivals. The gayer our merri- 
ment, the braver our recourse 
to those pleasures that warmed 
the soul of Elia, — "the cheerful 
glass, and candlelight, and fire- 
side conversations, and innocent 
vanities, and jests, " — the more 
importunately do we remember ; 
the more vividly actual become 
that dear and silent company 
who take their places among us 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

on that day: whose eyes smile 
at us gravely, with incorrigible 
tenderness, across the laughter 
of those whose presence is so 
much less evident to our sense. 

And how steady is the growth 
of that phantasmal gathering! 
How increasingly numerous are 
those unbidden but passionate- 
ly wished-for guests, who have 
come before the lights are lit, 
who bring no gifts and can take 
none from our eager hands, who 
linger after the last footfall has 
3 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

grown faint in the sharp air, 
who remain after the house is 
dark and still, empty but for 
ourselves and them! There are 
times for all of us when, recall- 
ing the terrible epigram of 
Victor Hugo, — that we are all 
under sentence of death, with 
an indefinite reprieve, — we won- 
der desperately how long it 
will be before the only guests 
we shall care to summon to 
our festivities are those who 
need no summons, for whom we 
need burn no lights: when our 
4 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

thoughts may be as the thoughts 
of Alexander Smith, meditating 
alone on Christmas night: "I 
hear a sound as of light music, a 
whisk of women's dresses whirled 
round in dance, a clink as of 
glasses pledged by friends. 
Before one of these apparitions 
is a mound, as of a new-made 
grave, on which snow is ly- 
ing. I know, I know ! Drape 
thyself not in white like the 
others, but in mourning stole 
of crape; and, instead of 
dance music, let there haunt 
5 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

around thee the service for the 
dead!" 

It is upon this year's Christ- 
mas, perhaps, that we find our- 
selves looking into the firelight 
and saying to a beloved and 
close-held Memory, with an 
elegist of today: "There has 
been twilight here, since one 
whom some name Life and some 
Death slid between us the little 
shadow that is the unfathomable 
dark and silence." Or we are 
hearing, it may be, the ineffably 
pathetic voices of those children 
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A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

of vision seen in the revery of 
Lamb: "We are nothing; less 
than nothing, and dreams. We 
are only what might have 
been. 

Nor is Christmas, as we meet 
it after the going down of many 
suns, colored with no darker 
emotions than those of grief 
and elegiacal regret. To every 
man of sensibility, to every ideal- 
ist, conscious or unconscious, 
— and who of us is not, in some 
fortunate hour, an idealist? — 
7 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

the Christmases that come in 
our autumnal years are certain 
to be embittered by despond- 
ency over the unbridged gap 
between aspiration and ful- 
filment, over the lengthening 
record of our futilities and be- 
trayals. The flood of affection 
and generosity that surges about 
us at this season dislodges and 
casts up from the hidden places 
of the soul a thousand memories 
of injustice and negligence, of 
harshness and egoism, which, we 
had fatuously thought, were 
8 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

cancelled by the mere act of 
forgetfulness. The most buoy- 
ant among us know at times 
these moods of disheartenment 
that are the sombre corollary 
of the Christmas season. They 
cannot forget the lost hours 
that call to them reproach- 
fully out of the past; they 
understand that haunted and 
touching cry of a poet of the 
Gael: 



The dead are happy, the dust is in 
their ears. 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

But is there not a lucid inti- 
mation for the spirit in precisely 
this fact of Christmas melan- 
choly? Surely the secret of 
happiness and the secret of 
peace lie folded one within the 
other; and the profounder signi- 
ficance that Christmas hides 
behind the gentle beauty of its 
pageantry — does it not reward 
the most moderately patient 
scrutiny, if only that be intrepid 
and unwavering and direct? It 
is the lesson that is taught by 
the ancient Wisdom of the East 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

when it tells us that our only 
hope of abiding happiness lies in 
our privilege of seeing it through 
other men's eyes: that this 
is the secret of peace. And 
what more shall you glean from 
that but the simple truth which 
was taught in Palestine: that 
only he who loses his life shall 
find it? We know that the 
precious things of the world 
fade and pass with the mere 
transit of the years. We know 
that the inexhaustible richness, 
fascination, and savor of life as- 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

sure to us, as individuals, no last- 
ing happiness. "There's night 
and day, brother, both sweet 
things; sun, moon, and stars, 
all sweet things; there's likewise 
a wind on the heath. Life is 
very sweet, brother." Sweet, 
indeed, and infinitely desirable; 
but little to be trusted as a source 
of enduring personal delight. 
Through the night and through 
the day and across the heath 
may troop the ghosts of how 
many abortive hours — of how 
many unperformed kindnesses, 
12 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

abandoned generosities, fore- 
gone ideals! The sublime re- 
buke of the stars can be 
intolerable. The wind, that 
mysterious awakener of the 
past, can bring an unutterable 
sadness upon the spirit. So 
that, in the end, we are tempted 
to cry out, with Shankara, "It 
is not this ! It is not this ! " 

But we look upon a new 

heaven and a new earth, full of 

serene and transforming light, 

when we come to understand 

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A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

what was really meant by that 
behest to love our neighbor as 
ourself : when we perceive that, 
far from exhorting us to love him 
as we love ourself, it tells us — as 
one of the wisest counsellors of 
our time has revealingly put it — 
that we are to love him as being 
ourself: * ' In the splendid hour 
of illumination, we are alone in 
the silence and darkness of the 
immortal world. Yet not alone, 
for the inmost holy of holies is 
full of the souls of men. In that 
dread presence all are one, and 



A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

that one the Soul. . . . Thence- 
forward, we need not go abroad 
to find our other selves. They 
come to us, pressing closely round 
our souls, in vision or in blind- 
ness, in sadness or in mirth, in love 
or hate. But above love or hate 
or sorrow is the immemorial 
essence of our common soul . . . 
all move in the one Light." 

It is as an indication of 

this august secret of human 

life that Christmas has its 

deepest and most exquisite 

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A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION 

significance. It offers us a 
diviner opportunity than a mere 
provocation to generous and af- 
fectionate thought. For in the 
sudden radiance which it throws 
upon the world we may see, with 
a magical and tender clarity, 
those other souls that flock con- 
tinually about our own : that are, 
indeed, ourself . We shall know, 
then, with a certainty beyond 
dismay, that in the Supreme 
Self, which is the Eternal, our- 
selves and all other selves are set, 
"as the rays are set in the Sun. M 
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